Four Ways to Save All Tomatoes at Once

In the most ideal world, you would process all the tomatoes in one weekend. Save yourself the miserable task of heating the kitchen, burning your fingers, and being on your feet endlessly for a day or two when you can get everyone you know to help out, or at least watch an entire season or two of something alone.

If you are a smart bird, you will achieve this by buying all the tomatoes at once. The most self-reproached of us, gardeners, are determined to grow tomatoes too. Ripe ones are depleted not in a weekend, but in six weeks. This is the worst teaser because you have to deal with them every few days for such a long period. Here’s how to shorten that time so you don’t have to spend all of August at the stove.

Collect and freeze

When the tomatoes are ripe, you can toss them into freezer bags, pump out as much air as possible (which can be tricky due to the shape of the tomatoes), and freeze . Defrost when you need them; The upside is that they slip right out of your skin when you do this.

The downside is that the tomatoes lose all their tomato shape; you work with porridge; And personally, I think that after deep freezing, the taste is a bit lacking. However, this is the best way to store tomatoes until you want to deal with them if you have room in the freezer and in fact you were probably going to cook the tomatoes anyway, so porridge works to your advantage. .

Processing and retention

If I have a decent enough catch but not enough to be canned, I peel the tomatoes and roast them, essentially take them to where I might otherwise store them, then toss them in the fridge for a few days until more tomatoes are ready to be harvested. It’s not an uncertain situation – you have a few days – but the moment you combine them with other processed tomatoes, you boil the tomatoes and process them in a hot water bath or autoclave, and as long as you do it right , everything will be OK.

Pick ’em green

This is a controversial opinion, but I stick to it. If you pick green tomatoes and then ripen inside, they will all ripen at the same time. Try it with a few to see for yourself. Keep them in a brown bag with a banana and they will ripen no matter how green they are. The main thing is to check them daily, remove ripe ones, turn them over and let fresh air through.

Trade them

This is my favorite trick. I have many gardening friends and often trade early tomatoes for late ones. We all benefit from the fact that we eventually have the right amount of materials to process.

Let it go

Listen, I’m a good gardener. I am a good keeper. I have all the jars. But sometimes I look at the garden and understand that it simply does not exist in me. In those days, it was about self-preservation, not food preservation. Sometimes you just eat tomatoes with good flaky salt. Or you’re preparing an incredibly delicious serving of fresh salsa. Sometimes you throw them in the slow cooker and make tomato paste because it’s quick and easy. When all else fails, pick up the tomatoes and offer them to your neighbors on their morning walk as if they were apples. It’s okay if the joy that tomatoes bring goes to someone else.